The feminist

A: Last week Erica Jong's daughter Molly was to be found chewing over this very question in the Daily Mail. "Feminism is shifting towards consumerism," she said. "Women today can be frivolous every now and again and not be ashamed. My generation don't need to believe we should be the same as men in every way, because we know we're not. It means we can wear makeup, buy a new bag and just enjoy the moment."

How proud Erica must be! But to answer your question, I can tell you that despite Molly's rather nonsensical comments, and despite the recent appointment of noted brainiac Linda Grant as a shopping correspondent for this paper, shopping is not the new feminism. Shopping is, in fact, the new slavery.

Firstly, women at the top of the world have been brainwashed into thinking that unless they have the perfect hamster-hair nose-warmer (say), they will look horrid and be less fanciable and do less well at work. Therefore, they must spend every Saturday and every lunch hour scouring the shops for said nose-warmer, and when they find it they must pay £245 for it - even if it means going into debt, and even though in the sniff of one nostril, hamster-hair nose-warmers will be entirely Last Month and banished to the back of some cupboard.

All the freedoms these women have won - to work, and to have time off work for their own pursuits; to earn money and to spend it as they please - are thus frittered away on a chimaera of need. These women say that they love shopping, but then heroin addicts say they love heroin ... and are none the less enslaved by it.

Meanwhile, down below, another set of women entirely spend 15 hours a day in appalling conditions making hamster-hair nose-warmers, at the rate of about a shilling a month and with no health insurance, maternity pay or pension.

Of course, we do need clothes, and pots to cook in and food to put in our pots - and not all of us have the time or resources to knock these things up from a bit of beech wood and an old sock; some shopping at least must be classed as essential. But the only way to shop without being a dreaded anti-feminist is to keep it to a sensible minimum, and to buy goods that are produced by people who are looked after properly by their bosses. In the short term, this may mean dressing like a crazed hippy, but perhaps if we all made a point of shopping in a truly feminist fashion, then Topshop and the other big girls would soon be fighting to get in on the act.